[joyful-ii-V-I]

Two changes above the fold, plus a second line on the banner. No claim is dropped and no published number moves.

The banner gains a second line

"See the rip before you're in it." in #F2B84B — the hero's amber, the wire half of the wordmark — with a breaking wave at each end answering the surfboards on the line above. 21px against the first line's 30px, so it reads as the follow-through rather than a competing headline.

The wave took five attempts and the failures were all the same mistake, which is worth one line so nobody repeats it: a circular arc reads as a rainbow, a filled mound reads as a dune, and nested symmetric arcs read as an archway. What makes a wave read at 44px is asymmetry — a long gentle face on one side, a tight throwing lip on the other — so the shape here is a swept curve with a short tuck rather than any kind of arc.

The order above the fold

Now leads with what someone deciding whether to try this can check in ten seconds:

1. Fifty years of software-engineering results, and research from last month
2. Languages
3. No API key. No embeddings. No index server. No daemon.

"The goal: one question, one complete answer" moves down to sit immediately above "Same answer, a fraction of the tokens", where the terminality argument is next to the table that pays it off. Its first paragraph — the actual claim — stays visible; the two paragraphs on the stair-steps fold behind a click. Terminality is the principle behind the numbers, and it lands better once you have seen one.

Three tightenings

• The top said the same thing twice. The h2 and the sentence under it were one idea in two registers, and the reader paid for both before reaching anything checkable. Merged into one heading that keeps both halves.
• The four negations are a badge row, not a section heading — docs/assets/no-deps.svg, four outlined chips in the wordmark's cyan. It is a local asset, deliberately, rather than shields.io: this project's whole claim is that it needs no network, and a README that fetches four images from a badge CDN to say "no daemon" argues against itself. Alt text and the SVG <title> carry the same four facts, so nothing is lost to a screen reader or a text-only view.
• The lineage summary was ~340 characters — a wall of prose as the first thing after the banner, before the reader has clicked anything. Cut to ~250. The gated substring 46 repositories and 69 papers and the docs/LINEAGE.md link are untouched.

The Languages list stays in full, deliberately

It was tempting to collapse 23 names to a count plus a link, and that would have been wrong. A stranger scanning for their language is exactly who that line exists for, and "23 languages…" does not answer that question — the twenty-three names do. Same reason the card logos are at the checkout.

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Verified on the exact tip: CI 26/26; readmedrift, readmeexample, deplangs and ripwirepublic green. The set diff against main's gate loop is empty — this lane adds no gate, so it inherits main's count of 577 and carries no count-collision risk.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

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Caution

Review failed

The pull request is closed.

ℹ️ Recent review info

⚙️ Run configuration

Configuration used: Organization UI

Review profile: CHILL

Plan: Advanced

Run ID: 20f3ec15-7014-43ed-908e-ef037978a0b2

📥 Commits

Reviewing files that changed from the base of the PR and between 633a1d2 and 82ae035.

⛔ Files ignored due to path filters (2)

• docs/assets/no-deps.svg is excluded by !**/*.svg
• docs/assets/paddle-out.svg is excluded by !**/*.svg

📒 Files selected for processing (1)

• README.md

Cache: Disabled due to data retention organization setting

Knowledge base: Disabled due to Reviews -> Disable Knowledge Base setting

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📝 Summary

Summary by CodeRabbit

• Documentation
  • Restructured the README introduction for clearer positioning.
  • Moved the “one question, one complete answer” section into a collapsible details block.
  • Replaced a heading with an image conveying the same message through alt text.
  • Shortened the introductory details summary wording.

Walkthrough

The README introduction was restructured. Its main heading and details summary changed, a feature heading became an image, and the goal explanation moved into a later expandable section.

Changes

README presentation

Layer / File(s)	Summary
Reorganize README introduction README.md	The introduction heading and details summary were revised. The API and indexing statement became an image. The goal explanation and token-budget content moved into a new expandable section.

Estimated code review effort: 1 (Trivial) | ~5 minutes

Suggested reviewers: quaterniondrift, andriytyurnikov

✨ Finishing Touches

🧪 Generate unit tests (beta)

• Create PR with unit tests
• Commit unit tests in branch lane/readme-rip-tagline-2026-09-10

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